User blog:Ace1580/The Problem of Pornography - 4
Some of my Story So I found myself as a Christian who grew up in the church and had a reputation as the good kid. And yet I fell into the trap of lust and pornography and I could not get out. There were a lot of things that really horrified me about the prospect of being addicted to pornography. Of course there was the guilt and shame, and the fear of being caught. Those were big ones. But deep down I couldn’t shake the fear that I was slowly being changed. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, and if you had told me that pornography was gradually, but effectively changing my views on sex, I would have said that I really don’t feel any different. If you would have asked me if pornography was affecting the way I viewed the women, some of them close friends, around me, I would answered a firm no. But the fact is, things were changing in my life. I had begun to think that God was punishing me for my addiction, and that was the reason I had been single for so long. I was frustrated and felt the full weight of guilt. “If only I could be free from this” I would think “then maybe God would let me be in a relationship.” The reality of the matter was that God was not punishing me, he was protecting me. Because after only three years of pornography, sex is what was on my mind-personal fulfillment and pleasure-and that’s really not what you want going into a relationship. I ceased to see the women around me, and more often saw what my fantasies wanted to see. I risked punishment, and humiliation, to meet my sexual desires, and even without those, I wasted a lot of time. It was really only after God delivered me that I saw the impact that pornography had on my life, and it would be years later before I really understood the full consequences of my choices. Though God had given me complete forgiveness, the impact of my foolishness remained. Now, I’m married to an amazing woman, who knows my whole story and my struggles and has forgiven me for my past as surely as God has. Yet even now, I still feel the impact of pornography (though it’s much less now than it was three years ago), and I still (as I suspect many older and married men and women do) have to stand against lust on a daily basis. The Lie of Pornography Back in the first session we disgusted at length the concept of lust as idolatry. We talked about how when we are lusting, we are worshiping creation rather than creator. Worship is a multifaceted thing. We find that as we direct our worship to God, we find that over time we are changed. Meanwhile, if we direct our worship elsewhere, to money, recognition, power or the like, we find that we become greedy, prideful, or downright maleficent. This highlights a powerful and terrifying reality. We become like what we worship. This becomes troublesome when we are dealing with pornography. You see, the dilemma with pornography is that it, in and of itself, is a fantasy. Pornography paints a portrait of sex that is nothing like reality. While sex is designed by God to be something giving and beautiful; something designed to build emotional connectedness and intimacy in a married relationship, pornography is about feeling good, fulfilling your own sexual desires and doing so under your conditions, it’s just your fantasy. Meanwhile, in the second session we talked about how pornography can be seen as an alternative to sex; one without the possible repercussions of pregnancy, emotional commitments, or diseases. To the Christian, pornography seems like a less “sinful” option in meeting our sexual desires. This is the great lie of pornography, the lie that makes it easier to descend into addiction, and makes it easier to stay there. Pornography tells us that we can indulge our desires in that way without that sort of worship affecting us and the people around us. It tells us that pornography doesn’t hurt anyone. Pornography Doesn’t Hurt Anyone It needs to be understood that there is no such thing as a personal, private sin. As German theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote “There is no sin in thought, word, or deep, no matter how personal or secret, that does not inflict injury upon the whole fellowship.” Even indulging in pornography will impact the entire body of Christ. First of all, pornography hurts us. Any sin leaves behind guilt for the Christian. This impacts the way we view ourselves, and the way we act around others. When pornography becomes an addiction this effect is particularly pronounced. More than one person has described to me how much the guilt of their actions weighed on them, as if they felt an actual weight on their chest. I myself know this feeling as well. One of the reasons why I finally broke down and sought accountability in my life was because the guilt and shame of what I was doing began to literally make my stomach ache. As we discussed in the first session, any time we live contrary to the image we are being transformed into, we feel the negative effects in one way or another. It doesn’t help matters that sexual sin is so stigmatized. As Christians, it’s easy to believe that sexual sins are somehow more serious than others and pile on top of that the fact that so often we fight to keep something like an addiction to pornography absolutely secret and you have the recipe for a perfect storm of guilt. Carrying that burden can undermine attempts at intimacy with God. Whether it’s out of a sense of unworthiness for being before a God who’s full of grace, or fear before a God who demands holiness from us, it’s hard to read your Bible, pray or worship with a sincere heart when all you can think about is how you sinned again that morning. It’s easy to sympathize with Isaiah as he stood before God and said “Woe to me!...I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” As an aside, some of this guilt isn’t real. It’s manufactured by the enemy, who is quite content seeing us drive ourselves away from our Father. In truth, it’s no more sinful than using God’s name in vain, or stealing a candy bar (or perhaps a song off the internet?). But this is really just playing into enemy plans. The worst thing you can do is shrink from God when struggling. There is no amount of sin that we can carry in our life that will prevent us from going to Him, asking for forgiveness, and having our relationship restored, and it’s not more difficult for Him to wash away the guilt we bear for sexual sins than for the guilt we feel for insulting a friend (though sometimes we have to make restitution, and change our lives, but that’s a whole other lesson). The impact that pornography has on our spiritual life is probably the single most powerful refutation to the lie that no one is hurt, because an impact on our spiritual life will have an impact on everything else. As such, it’s not the end of the changes that we will see if we allow pornography to be a persistent presence. Pornography makes sex an obsession At surface level, pornography will develop a preoccupation with sex. Most of us, particularly as young adults, don’t need any more fuel to add to the fire of our sexual desires; we are preoccupied with sex as it is by the sheer nature of how attraction and hormones works. But pornography will douse the fires of sexual desire with gasoline. It drives this preoccupation on two levels. As we discussed in the last session, the more often you occupy yourself with meeting your sexual desires, the greater the urge to fulfill those sexual desires will be. As we went over before, this works fine in a married relationship, but as we go over the rest of this session it should become apparent why it’s a problem. The second level of this comes about by the sheer nature of pornography itself. Once you introduce pornography into the equation, your mind has raw material to work with in the form of images, text, or whatever it is. This raw material doesn’t just get dumped out of our brain. It stays there for a long time, possibly forever. This is a particular problem for men, who, as we’ve all heard over and over again, are visual in the way they are sexually stimulated. So now not only do you have a greater desire to fulfill your sex drive, but your imagination is also pushing you towards it with the bits and pieces of pornography your brain has subconsciously stored away. Perpetually indulge in pornography and you will quickly find yourself perpetually thinking about sex, and more so, sex that isn’t real. Obsessing over anything isn’t healthy, but an obsession with sex can have ramifications as seemingly innocuous as allowing yourself to be distracted in a conversation, to actively disrupting commitments, schedules and relationships in order to fulfill sexual desires instead. But pornography won’t just change how often your mind is on sex. Pornography makes sex selfish But the problem with pornography isn’t that it makes sex self-interested. There are plenty of things in this world that we do just because it makes us feel good (see: cookies). The real problem at the core of pornography is that it trains us to be self-interested I’ve touched on this in other places in this lesson, and will touch on it again, but I feel it’s important to lay this out here. The sex you find in pornography is nothing like real sex. Real sex, the way that God designed it, feels good, fantastic even, but the physicality associated with sex is not an ends in and of itself. Sex builds intimacy and emotional attachment. Sex, as God intended it, is about meeting the other person’s needs and desires. In a healthy relationship, it’s not hard for this to be the case: it doesn’t take long for it to be apparent in married relationship to see that the greater enjoyment of sex is not how it makes you feel, but how you can make your spouse feel. Furthermore, sex requires effort. When you realize that sex as God made it is very emotional and psychological, there comes the recognition that sex is bigger than just the act itself. A spouse often times needs a certain degree of trust, love and respect in place before they’re mentally prepared. As such, sex tends requires an investment of time, care, sensitivity and chaste affection before sex enters into the picture. This isn’t always the case, but it’s far from unusual. Pornography, however, includes none of this. You can’t have concern for your sexual partner when there isn’t one; you don’t have to be concerned about whether your spouse is emotionally or physically prepared, if they might be stressed or concerned about something else, or simply not desire sex at that point. Pornography gives you the option to indulge your sexual desire on your own terms. You can use pornography whenever you want, without a need to invest the time it takes to truly show love. In short, sex becomes entirely about you. Here’s the thing that can be frightening. Remember from the last session, we talked about the fact that sex causes the release of endorphins and other substances. When you have sexual release, you train your body to react that way in the future when based with the same stimuli. In a marriage, this means that the more you have sex with your spouse, the more your sexual response will be tied to your spouse. If this doesn’t demonstrate the fact that God was brilliant in his design, I don’t know what does. But here’s the problem: this effect doesn’t go away when we’re talking about pornography. When you use pornography, you are training your body to develop associations between your sexual response and the pornography itself. You become like what you worship. Sex goes from something we can use to get closer to our spouses, to demonstrate love, and to build oneness, into something that’s just about us feeling good. It can transform people into things that just exist to meet our sexual needs. This selfishness can carry itself into our friendships, relationships, and ultimately marriages. How this selfishness practically manifests will depend a lot on who you are, and the pornography you are exposing yourself to. But let’s explore some of the outcomes. When you are trained to treat sex as something that is all about you, you don’t exactly go to length to make sure your spouse is also experiencing sexual fulfillment. Sex lasts until your desires are fulfilled, and that’s the extent of your interest. Your spouse is left feeling sexually unsatisfied and emotionally alienated and uncared for. Let pornography become a continuing addiction and down the road it can actually lead to sexual dysfunction. Over time you need pornography more frequently and that’s more explicit to attain the same level of arousal. Pushed far enough, an individual can literally become incapable of having sex under the kind of circumstances that a traditional married relationship allows: you can find yourself needing pornography in order to facilitate sex with your spouse (note that we are still talking about how to meet your sexual needs). It should go without saying that this is not a good place to be either party. So what if we are not talking about marriage relationships? Or what if we adopt the argument that sounds like: “Well, I’m addicted to pornography now, but once I get married, I won’t need pornography anymore and will be able to drop it.” This is a terrifying and effective lie. We want to believe that when we have a spouse, they will be able to completely meet our sexual needs and we can leave pornography by the wayside. Do you see the issue with this kind of thinking? It’s still all about your spouse meeting your needs, not sex being a mutually uplifting and emotionally bonding experience. Furthermore, if you have developed a habit like pornography, from where do we get the idea that marriage, like the flipping of a switch, would simply end that addiction? And it doesn’t even take this long term damage for pornography to affect relationships. When a girlfriend, boyfriend, or spouse knows that the other person in the relationship is using pornography in any capacity, it leaves them wondering why they aren’t enough. I had a friend whose boyfriend was addicted to pornography. She came to me and tearfully poured out her hurting heart. What more could she do? What if she pushed the envelope just a little farther? Would he stop going to pornography? And while she came perilously close to compromising her convictions (in a move that had its ultimate impetus in a desire to feel loved; so she could feel like she was enough for him), all the while she found his addiction disgusting, and herself unclean by association. Meanwhile, he was wracked with guilt for putting her in this position, but was addicted nonetheless. Furthermore it doesn’t take being in a relationship to see the effects of pornography. As pornography makes sex all about you, it will also make the people around you all about sex. It’s a slow and subtle transition that isn’t immediately recognized, but eventually you’ll find that you are not so much interested in other people as much as how those people arouse you. Think about it. Pornography gives you an output for your sexual desires whenever you want thereby driving a preoccupation with sex, and portrays people who want to meet your needs as often as you have them, and everyone in pornography is like this. After a while it makes the leap from recognizing someone who’s beautiful and attractive, to lusting after them, much easier on a regular basis. Pornography will begin to degrade your respect for the entirety of the opposite sex. If you feed enough material into your brain that involves people being degraded and used, your brain will begin to be trained to think of people like this. You become like what you worship. Pornography warps your expectations of sex As we discussed early, pornography leaves out some major components of what sex is, but it also injects many things into sex that it isn’t. Pornography can seriously distort the real image of what sex is like. When a sexual relationship is entered into within marriage by two people who have managed to remain sexually innocent (note, that we are not talking ignorant here, as rare, and perhaps unrealistic as this is) then sex can be something that is newly discovered together. Within a married relationship, anything goes with sex, but both individuals can start with a blank slate and learn together what is comfortable. The difficulties that may come along with sex can be approached realistically and couples can work through them with love, and without concern that they aren’t measuring up to some sort of contrived standard. But when one or both persons have a history of pornography, there is some exposure to some things that would otherwise have been left to be discovered. Should you see or read about some particular sexual act in pornography, it’s not hard to drag that into your own desires for sex (again, your desires, we are still firmly in the realm of selfishness here), and begin to expect your spouse to do things that they may not be comfortable with. Meanwhile, you become frustrated, confused, and disappointed that what pornography depicted as perfectly normal, your spouse finds objectionable. On the other side of the relationship, your spouse is frustrated, confused and disappointed that you would ask things of them. Particularly in a very young marriage, some aspects of sex that are less “traditional” can lead a spouse to question just who they married, and what kind of person would desire these things, while had they slowly approached and discovered them together, there would have been no concern. If these feelings are left unchecked, and excellent communication doesn’t jump in quickly to sort out what’s going on, relationship are easily damaged. Unfortunately, when faced with a situation like the above, communication about sex is easy to sweep under the rug, which is just what the enemy wants. What’s more, pornography, even at its most traditional (if such a thing is possible) portrays sex as absurdly glamorous. Sex is always fantastic. No one ever struggles with any sort of sexual dysfunction. People have sex for precisely the right amount of time. The women in porn are always eager for sex while the men are always over-idealized. Pornography sets some pretty high standards for sex to be sure; standards that are not only impossible to meet, but also not really desirable to meet. For instance, pornography is rarely quiet, intimate or gently affectionate. It takes any sort of humor out of it (yes, there can be humor in sex, just like any other part of our lives, you’re going to need to learn to laugh at yourselves) and makes it overly-serious (if it doesn’t push it farther into the realm of violence, which is not uncommon). When you go from the sex found in pornography, to real sex, complications arise. You can feel inadequate, or find your spouse inadequate, when neither of you really are. Problems with sexual dysfunction become monumental since the people in pornography never experience them. And again, we end up with disappointment, confusion, and frustration. Godly sex is a homecooked meal. It may not always turn out exactly as you envision, but it has variety, and it made with love. Pornography is an all you can eat desert buffet. It may seem attractive at the time, but it’s one dimensional, saccharine, and will leave you feeling sick the next day. Spend too much time at the buffet, however, and you can begin to believe that this is what a homecooked meal looks like. You look like what you worship. Bringing it together All of this, understanding the selfishness of sex, and how it can warp expectations and desires, highlights a deeply buried and rarely understood truth. An addiction to pornography is not about sex. An addiction to pornography is about self-fulfillment, and control. It’s about sex under our conditions, when and how we want it. This is not sex in marriage. This is sex in a fantasy world we created. And as we’ve touched on over and over again, you become like what you worship. Your fantasy will collide with reality and problems will immediately erupt. For some people, the impact of pornography isn’t as great on their lives as it is for other. I consider myself lucky to have only experienced the consequences I did, and not more. Meanwhile, some people stay hooked longer, push their boundaries farther and end up doing things beyond what I did, and they may experience even fewer consequences, or many many more. But there is an underlying truth here, that 'whether pornography is a fringe part of your life, or saturates your daily existence it will do damage of some sort or another to your relationship with your spouse (whether now or in the future), friends, family, yourself, and God. ' Fortunately, no matter how far you’ve gone, whether you are still struggling with addiction, or have found freedom and now are dealing with the consequences of your past, there is hope. Remember, you become like what you worship. If worshiping lust, sex and pornography can warp the way you see the world around you, then turning your heart towards God can repair that damage. It may take time, effort, and sacrifice, but Christ is the redeemer, the one making all things new, and you are no exception. Category:Blog posts